1991 Canadian film
No Skin Off My Ass is a 1991 comedy-drama film by Bruce LaBruce.
LaBruce's debut feature film provides a template for many of the themes in LaBruce's later movies. Explicit sex scenes between LaBruce's character and von Brucker's are interwoven with a radical political message.
No Skin Off My Ass played at film festivals around the world and quickly became a cult film. Famously, Kurt Cobain declared it his favourite film.[1][2] The film's soundtrack includes songs by several punk bands such as Frightwig and Beefeater.[2]
Plot
A punk hairdresser (Bruce LaBruce), known only as “The Hairdresser”, becomes obsessed with a mute neo-Nazi skinhead (Klaus von Brücker). Jonesy (G. B. Jones), a lesbian underground film director and the skinhead's sister, attempts to bring her brother and the hairdresser together.[3] Throughout the film, Jonesy is also working on a documentary around the Symbionese Liberation Army.[4] The cast also includes Fifth Column band members Caroline Azar and Beverly Breckenridge.
Production
No Skin... was filmed in Toronto on a budget of $14,000. Most of the cast were people LaBruce previously knew and worked with, helping to keep the cost down: the main cast was LaBruce himself and von Brücker, who were boyfriends at the time, and some of the film's runtime is pornographic footage of the two having sex.[5] G.B. Jones, who LaBruce worked frequently with on projects like the J.D.s zines, also acted in the film.[3]
LaBruce shot and edited No Skin on 8mm black and white film, blown up to 16mm in post-production.[6]
Release
LaBruce's debut, according to him, "correspond[ed] with the burgeoning gay and lesbian film festival circuit and just sort of became a cult film."[5] Despite its enthusiastic reception, LaBruce "never expected it to go outside of underground bars in Toronto or alternative art spaces."[7] The movie has been shown at multiple film festivals and queer community events, including its debut at the 1991 Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival,[8] SPEW: The Homographic Convergence,[9][10] the 1993 Baltimore Lesbian and Gay Film Festival,[11] and many others.
More recently, No Skin... has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art twice,[4] at Outfest Los Angeles in 2016,[12] and at Visionär Film Fest in 2019.[13]
Reception
The film is discussed as "a queer retelling of Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park,"[5] a 1969 psychological thriller about obsession. Altman's film is based on a novel by the same name by Peter Miles. According to LaBruce,[14]
Altman de-queered it, so I decided to re-queer it... When I showed the film for the first time in Los Angeles in 1991, somebody brought Miles to my screening and he said my no-budget Super-8 movie was better than the Altman version! He gave me an autographed copy of his novel inscribed: "You got it right."
LaBruce's No Skin is, according to Alexander Cavaluzzo, "the voice of hardcore, tongue-in-cheek dissent with porn-packed political allegories."[3] The film is viewed today as "a homocore classic... a complex exploration of how subculture is articulated through style, and a poignant study in erotic fascination."[4]
